“Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.”

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.

Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.

Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.

At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.

There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess, to deny what we do not understand, and to insult what we envy!

The man who enters his wife’s dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.

Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.

Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another’s happiness than in your own.

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

Man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

Let not a man do what his sense of right bids him not to do, nor desire what it forbids him to desire. This is sufficient. The skillful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman.

Do not desire, for what you desire you get, and with it comes terrible bondage. It is nothing but bringing “noses on us,” as in the case of the man who had three boons to ask. We never get freedom until we are self-contained. “Self is the Saviour of self, none else.”

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

It taught him how to listen — how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.

To me the function of politics is to make possible the desirable.

One may gain political and social independence, but if one is a slave to his passions and desires, one cannot feel the pure joy of real freedom